7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy! Vol. 5, page 17
“You did?” Arnold stopped as well, turning back to cast a disbelieving glance at Rishe. “What did you tell her?”
“Ugh… Well, er…” A lamp affixed to a pillar in the hall illuminated Rishe’s hot cheeks. “I told her that you and I…”
“Yes?”
Her face was flushed with embarrassment, but she had to apologize for betraying his confidence. Even as the shame overwhelmed her, Rishe confessed her crime. “That we kissed…just once…”
She could only assume that Arnold was staring at her in exasperation. She didn’t know for sure because her eyes were squeezed shut, not brave enough to meet his gaze. After several seconds of silence, when her shame became nearly unbearable, Arnold finally spoke up.
“I…” However, as soon as he started, he immediately fell silent. He didn’t seem to be angry. Was the awkward air between them just in Rishe’s imagination?
Does he feel bad about it?
Rishe raised her head and blinked. Their kiss in the chapel had taken her completely by surprise. She’d been shocked and confused, having no idea why Arnold would do such a thing. She had also felt that he seemed oddly practiced at the act, which had weighed on her mind afterward as well.
Had there been some deeper meaning behind even that event?
“Hee hee hee.”
“What’s so funny?” Arnold asked awkwardly when Rishe covered her mouth to stifle the giggle. It was rare for him to be bothered by something like this.
“I just found your expression kind of cute, Prince Arnold,” Rishe said with a grin.
Arnold simply scowled, as though she were utterly incomprehensible. It probably bothered him, but Rishe smiled all the same.
“…Come on. Let’s go.”
“Ah! Wait, Prince Arnold!”
Arnold strode off, and Rishe hurried to return to her place at his side. They were headed from the detached palace to a room in the main palace that was reserved for important guests.
“Was it all right to leave this to Oliver?”
“This is the sort of thing he’s good at. And the time it’s taking is expected.”
There had been five chairs in the room they’d used for their strategy meeting. The people present were Arnold, Rishe, Gutheil, Sylvia, and Raul. But the final chair hadn’t been for the disguised Raul to use.
I feel bad for requesting this when Prince Arnold is already so exhausted, Rishe thought as they arrived at the main palace. Some Imperial Guards stood by the door to the room they’d be entering.
“Greetings, Your Highness. Lady Rishe.”
“What’s the situation inside?”
“No one has left. I imagine they’re still talking.”
The prince huffed in annoyance. Rishe smiled wryly, tugging on Arnold’s sleeve. “Shall we?”
Arnold gave a nod to one of the knights, who opened the door. At which point…
“That is precisely why! If now is not the time for justice’s loyal servant—Hermity’s crown prince—to act, then when is?!”
An overenthusiastic voice boomed into the hallway. On the receiving end was Arnold’s attendant, Oliver.
“Ha ha ha. You have just as much energy as always even at this late hour, Prince Dietrich.”
Rishe narrowed her eyes at her childhood friend and former fiancé. “Please do not tell me you’re causing trouble for Oliver, Prince Dietrich.”
“Rishe?! What are you doing here?! Lord Arnold as well…” Dietrich stood from his plush chair. His hand shot to his forehead, and he shook his head in exasperation. “I see. You wish to borrow my strength as well.”
“Oliver, we can get the story from you. Get rid of this man already.”
“Wait, wait, wait! You can’t just do this without me!” Dietrich frantically appealed to Arnold, who did not spare him so much as a glance.
Instead, he asked his attendant, “So?”
“Yes, my lord.” Oliver gathered up several documents and tapped their edges on the table with a smile. “As you suspected, Prince Dietrich is also here regarding the espionage organization.”
“Ugh!” Dietrich covered his face with his hands, sobbing dramatically.
Rishe found the sight downright bizarre. She gently asked Dietrich, “What happened with Oliver?”
“Nothing happened! This man simply started paying me compliments with a bright smile on his face, and I thought, ‘Why, he certainly has just the discerning eye I would expect from the attendant of Galkhein’s crown prince!’—and then all of a sudden I was confessing everything! Just what exactly happened?!”
As Dietrich sobbed and wailed, Arnold peered down his nose at the man like he truly couldn’t care less.
“Urgh, this wasn’t supposed to happen! I was planning to reveal the weighty secret in a cooler way…”
“Oh, that’s quite unnecessary. Please don’t worry about such a thing.”
“I had my suspicions from the start. Pompous act or no, we were obviously going to question you.”
Dietrich deflated, sniffling, after Rishe and Arnold’s one-two punch. With a sardonic grin, Oliver comforted the foreign prince.
“Now, now, you two. We just had a very fruitful conversation. After all, the prince’s actual circumstances did differ a bit from our external suppositions.”
“O-Oliver! You really are a good guy!”
“Hey. Keep your hands off my attendant,” Arnold barked.
Rishe sighed as she watched Dietrich cling to Oliver.
At the guard station today, Dietrich had been about to reveal something to Rishe. He had likely wanted to discuss this but had rethought the moment to get the “cooler reveal” he desired.
Prince Arnold always suspected he might be involved.
It wasn’t just the party where Dietrich had called off his and Rishe’s engagement. Before summoning Sylvia to the detached palace, Rishe and Arnold had had a conversation about Dietrich as well.
“The spy organization is obviously involved in your ex-fiancé’s trip here as well,” Arnold had said up on the ramparts that evening. “He made it seem like he was here out of concern for your engagement to me, but it’s no coincidence that he was at the theater that night.”
“It does seem likely, doesn’t it?”
Dietrich’s illogical actions were an everyday occurrence for Rishe, who had witnessed a whole childhood’s worth of them. To Arnold, however, his presence at the theater was just the cherry on top of the suspicions he already held since the party in Hermity—which meant Dietrich was another matter requiring investigation.
It was impossible for Arnold to think Dietrich might only be there to see the opera.
“But, Prince Arnold…”
After that exchange, they’d opted to leave Dietrich’s interrogation to Oliver. After all, just as Arnold said, it was something he excelled at.
“Why the delay in schedule, Oliver?” Rishe asked him.
“Ah. Well, you see, it was the intelligence organization I wished to ask about, but I thought I might get the prince to confide in me with a bit of reminiscing on the past first. He had much more to say than I expected.”
“Goodness… You certainly went above and beyond, then…”
This, too, Arnold had anticipated. It was possible that he’d had Oliver engage in such interrogations in the past as well.
“In listening to his reminiscences, however, I got a good idea of the prince’s thought processes. Also, I must say, I imagine Prince Dietrich’s coup will fail.”
“Ah! Hold on a second, Oliver! I told you that was a secret, didn’t I?!”
“Prince Dietrich, we’re all aware of your planned coup, so could you hush for a moment?”
“What?!”
Dietrich was shocked by Rishe’s words, but she didn’t feel like going into the details for him. And Arnold was focused entirely on his conversation with Oliver.
“I don’t care about the details. You got what we need from him, yes?”
“An operative from the organization contacted Prince Dietrich a little over a year ago, in the third month last year. Does that ring any bells, Lady Rishe?”
“A month later, Lady Mary entered the academy as a scholarship student.”
“That would be Prince Dietrich’s current fiancée.”
Dietrich’s face went white at the mention of Mary’s name. “Wait! Mary has nothing to do with those villains!”
“We’re aware of that. Lady Mary was likely only used for this one incident. Considering her family’s financial troubles, it’s hard to imagine she’s been employed as a spy for a long time. If she were a member of the organization, she would be adequately compensated for her work, at the very least.”
Rishe highly doubted she was after information from Dietrich. It was obvious even to foreign powers that Dietrich was not heavily involved in his country’s political affairs.
Oliver nodded. “I agree with Lady Rishe’s assessment. It’s likely that the organization was after Prince Arnold from the start, not any intelligence from Prince Dietrich.”
“It’s possible they facilitated Lady Mary’s enrollment into the academy and encouraged her to seek a marriage with a royal or noble she would meet there. Of course, all the sons of prominent families would already have been engaged. The organization didn’t have to specify an individual—and there was only one option likely to act so boldly as to break an engagement.”
All eyes in the room landed on Dietrich, who was pleased as punch by the attention.
“I assume Lady Mary approached Prince Dietrich and then used the methods suggested by the organization to falsify my ‘crimes’ against her,” Rishe said. “Prince Dietrich fell for it and resolved himself to condemn me. He is a rather straightforward thinker, so it’s likely the organization would have foreseen all of this.”
“…”
“Please don’t make such a face, Prince Arnold! Despite it all, he really is a very upright person. His one-track mind and tendency to get the wrong idea about things are flaws, though.”
Again, Dietrich appeared rather pleased with himself. Arnold clicked his tongue, deciding to simply allow the conversation to progress.
“Assuming the organization’s goal was not intelligence from Prince Dietrich, or his breaking off our engagement, but Prince Arnold’s traveling to Hermity…”
It was a rather roundabout plan. Still, with organizations like this, plans that took several years to come to fruition were a regular occurrence. Since this one only took a little over a year, it could even be said to be a faster-moving plot.
“Augh… Damn that organization! Making use of me is bad enough, but Lady Mary too?! She has an even purer heart than I! But we will not give in to their machinations! Yes, at first, Mary may have had such an objective. But the love we foster between us now is true—”
“A suspicious entity attended a party in the third month last year calling himself an official from Halil Rasha.”
“Hey, Oliver! Weren’t you going to listen to what I had to say?!”
Prince Dietrich seems oddly attached to Oliver…
Rishe saw why Arnold had been so confident in his attendant’s abilities.
Oliver briskly continued, “The individual approached Prince Dietrich and suggested holding a coup d’état sometime in the near future to him. Isn’t that right, Your Highness?”
Dietrich nodded reluctantly.
The desert nation of Halil Rasha… King Zahad’s country. If the spy named himself an official of Halil Rasha, however, the country is likely uninvolved.
No self-respecting schemer would reveal their true allegiance so readily. Halil Rasha was a great nation. It was currently friendly with Galkhein, but in the future, it would become one of the few countries able to fight back in Arnold’s war. If the organization’s goal was to weaken Galkhein, they may have told this lie to cause the relationship between Galkhein and Halil Rasha to deteriorate, should their plot come to light.
“For them to go so far to bring Prince Arnold to Hermity…”
Rishe recalled the bandit attack on their way back to Galkhein. Their carriage had been attacked and Arnold’s knights wounded, the attackers’ weapons coated in a numbing poison. At the time, Rishe had concocted an antidote to the drug.
The reason he had his knights withdraw and fought with the assailants himself was because he already suspected something more behind that attack.
Arnold had a tendency toward self-sacrifice. That bad habit was probably the main reason why he had fought the attackers off himself. But he was likely also concerned that the bandits were really intelligence operatives who had undergone special training. Even that bandit attack was a possibility Arnold had already foreseen.
“To move between Hermity and Galkhein, you have to travel down a small, rarely used road. As a result, you’re forced to travel with a small party, and His Highness’s Imperial Guard is already a limited force within Galkhein.”
That small road was one of the reasons Hermity hadn’t been invaded by Galkhein in the war, since it made moving an army difficult. Despite being Galkhein’s neighbor, Hermity had been able to escape invasion for that reason—that and the fact that Galkhein stood to gain little from conquering the small nation.
Perhaps that was why the mastermind had called Arnold to Hermity. They wanted to use the favorable circumstances that forest road afforded them to attack Arnold and harm him and Galkhein.
“Those bandits had a paralysis agent coated on their weapons. No matter how strong Prince Arnold may be, against poisons and drugs…” Rishe shuddered at the idea.
Arnold, however, didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned. “It makes no difference. What is poison going to do on a weapon that can’t even graze me?”
“I’m aware that a mere bandit could never get the better of you, Your Highness, but even so…!” Rishe still wished he would rely on those around him more. The anxiety she felt seemed like a contradiction, since she did have faith in Arnold’s skills.
Oliver then asked, “It was also this so-called Halil Rasha official who advised you to break off your engagement with Lady Rishe, was it not, Prince Dietrich?”
“Um… N-no, I wasn’t compelled to the decision! I did what I did out of a sense of justice and for the sake of my beloved Mary!”
“Shut up. Stop talking.”
“Eep!”
Arnold spat the words out before accepting a document from Oliver and skimming its contents. Rishe tiptoed to try to see it as well and, noticing this, Arnold lowered his hand. She thanked him, and they read through the document together.
Dietrich started pacing around them restlessly.
“Say, Lord Arnold—”
“Shut up. Don’t talk to me.”
“Hrk! R-Rishe, then!”
When Dietrich went to Rishe for help, Arnold looked at him like there was nothing that could possibly annoy him more.
“If you’re going to bother Rishe instead, then I’ll listen.”
“Oh! You will?!” Dietrich’s face lit up, after which he hung his head before saying hesitantly, “I-I heard from Oliver, you see. You’re planning to use the songstress Sylvia as bait to capture the evil organization that bamboozled me, are you not?”
They had agreed beforehand not to tell Dietrich of Sylvia’s involvement with the spy organization. What Oliver had told him was likely along the lines of “Sylvia is a willing collaborator in our plan to apprehend the spies.”
“I-It’s just, you know… A crown prince must be daring and cool, right?! He must stand in the spotlight and shine more than a normal civilian! He’s a crown prince, after all!”
“What are you trying to say?”
“In other words, um…” After a great show of hesitation, Dietrich finally said, “Rather than a frail songstress, it should be a mighty figure such as myself who fills the dangerous role of the bait in your plan!”
Oliver gaped at Dietrich. Arnold eyed him, expressionless as ever.
Regret flashed across Dietrich’s face, but he continued, “It’s a frightening task to be the bait, is it not? It’s cruel to ask such a thing of a mere songstress. Me, on the other hand—well, I’m always steeled for such a thing! I am a proud crown prince!”
“…”
“You know, I did think it was a bit strange! I was supposed to meet with someone yesterday, but they never arrived at the rendezvous spot. I was even waiting with a cloak on, looking rather cool and mysterious if I may say so myself! Ever since, I’ve gotten the faint sense that maybe I was being deceived… N-no, I mean, I foresaw all this from the very beginning! Yes, I always suspected a mysterious entity might have their sights set on Galkhein, which is why I came all the way here to warn you! A-all this to say…if you have need of me, I would gladly take on the role of the bait myself…”
Dietrich was very obviously trembling with fear, yet he made this declaration all the same.
“Wow, Prince Dietrich,” Rishe said, shocked by his courage. “Unfortunately, you have no value as bait.”
“Wha—?!”
His legs almost gave out from under him at Rishe’s unflinching assessment.
“It was likely no more than a grunt of the organization who contacted you, Your Highness. You have no information the organization would kill you to protect.”
“That’s all my life is worth?!” Dietrich seemed to be taking it rather poorly, but if anything, this was good news for him.
The same can’t be said for Sylvia, though. As someone who’s worked for the organization since childhood, even if she’s a low-ranking member, she simply knows too much…
That was why they were after her life. And as her friend, Rishe wanted to protect her no matter what.
“Not to worry,” Oliver interjected. “As a matter of fact, your life is absolutely in danger as well.”
“Huh?!”
“Oliver…?”
“That’s right. The organization’s instructions for Prince Dietrich went something like this: ‘The evil empire of Galkhein must be stopped as soon as possible. As the prince of the crown princess’s homeland, we would like you to contact Galkhein’s royal family.’ The meeting place on the prince’s first day in the country was specified as the theater.”
“Y-you’ve got it all wrong! I doubted their words, of course I did! I thought, ‘Is Galkhein truly as bad as they say?’ Thus I, the crown prince, came all the way here to see it for myself!”
